[lbo-talk] Chomsky on Foucault

[Brian Siano]

On Mon, 1 Sep 2003 08:39:31 -0700 (PDT), andie nachgeborenen 
<andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
> Actually I think Foucault, unleke Derrida or
> Baudrillard, is a prettuy plain, straughforward
> writer, not pretty, but not overaly jargonistic,
> unlike most pomos or analytical philosophers, me
> included. What exactly of Foucault's ideas did you
> want to know somjething about? He wrote a lot about a
> lot of topics? Was there something in particular that
> puzzled you, or did you want the whole thing inm a
> paragraph? jks

I'll support this. I tried to read Derrida, and thought it was word salad. 
Maybe, if I spent a few years reading him very, very carefully, I might get 
some interesting insight... but I couldn't imagine any insight being worth 
that degree of work. And I have bills to pay and projects to finish.

As for Baudrillard, I read him about fifteen years ago at the insistence of 
some acquaintances. And I ws utterly shocked that these people would think 
that this derivative, empty _drivel_ could be considered profound. I had 
the feeling that his conception of America was an amalgam of 1950's era 
advertisement styles, at best-- it was like reading those dopey 
architectural manifestoes that pushed the reps of Le Corbusier and Mies Van 
der Rohe. As for his notions of simulacra, Philip K. Dick did it better 
decades before, and it's all just a riff on Plato's shadows on the walls of 
a cave. I finally realized that, while I'd been through this what-if-it's- 
all-an-illusion stuff when I was thirteen, and reading science fiction like 
a maniac, these acquaintances hadn't run into it until they read 
Baudrillard. So they thought he was utterly brilliant. Baudrillard's 
profundity is inversely proportional to the experience of the reader.